December Park(64)

In a town like Harting Farms, with all its honeycombs and shadowed, forgotten places, a serial murderer could hide literally anywhere.

Scott produced his butterfly knife. He flipped it open in one graceful swipe. “I’m prepared in case of an attack.”

“Terrific,” Michael commented. “I feel safer already. If the Piper comes after us, you can give him a nice shave.”

When we reached the clearing, we stopped and looked around. I thought, Yeah, this is right. This is the perfect spot.

Adrian dropped his backpack onto the ground. Sunlight speared through the trees in narrow shafts, creating golden pools of light along the dead, wet leaves that carpeted the earth. Scott, too, set down his backpack. He was still twirling the butterfly knife, his dark eyes sharp and alert.

Michael stepped around the clearing while looking down, as if to examine the ground for booby traps or evidence of enemy armies. He removed the army helmet, and his hair fell down in that perfect right-sided part. His sunglasses hung from the collar of his University of Maryland sweatshirt, which was about two sizes too small and stippled with holes.

I sauntered over to one of the headless concrete statues hidden beneath the underbrush. I felt around for it with my foot. Thud. I practically collapsed onto it, suddenly taken aback at the strength of my exhaustion. I took the binoculars from around my neck and dropped them at my feet.

Peter joined me on the statue. His exhaustion was evident in the drawn-out expulsion of air that issued from his lungs. Sweat beaded his forehead.

Adrian remained standing, his back toward us, his backpack sinking into the muck at his feet. The outline of his frame was silvered in sunlight and veined with the shadows of interlocked tree limbs. There was nothing but an endless wealth of trees ahead of him, but he seemed focused on something the rest of us could not see.

Scott knelt down and dove into his backpack. I watched him withdraw the canteens, the walkie-talkies (we had found the chargers in Scott’s basement, and the handhelds worked commendably), a spiral-bound notebook with a ballpoint pen clipped to the front cover, some items wrapped in tinfoil, an alarm clock, and the dynamo-powered radio. He caught me staring at him, smiled, then tossed something white in my direction that I originally mistook for a baseball. When I caught it I was surprised by the sponginess of it. It was a pair of gym socks rolled up into a ball.

“I brought some for everyone. I figured the ground would be wet. No reason to catch frostbite, right?” Scott tossed balled-up socks at the other guys.

“You should have been a Boy Scout,” Peter told him.

“I’m too smart to be a Boy Scout.”

“Hey. I was a Boy Scout,” said Michael, catching the pair of gym socks that Scott launched at him.

“Yeah,” Scott said coolly. “See what I mean?”

Michael flipped him the bird.

In the end, Scott was left holding the remaining pair of socks that was meant for Adrian because Adrian was still staring off into the trees. Scott eventually dropped the socks into his backpack, then shrugged when he caught my eye again.

“Poindexter,” Michael called. “You okay, man?”

Adrian turned. With his sweatshirt hood over his head and the shadows of the overhead tree branches crisscrossing his face, I couldn’t make out his expression—couldn’t tell if he even had one.

“Sure,” Adrian said after a moment. He went over to a carved-out niche in a nearby tree and hoisted himself into it, pulling his knees up to his chest. He wore imitation Converse sneakers, the kind with the cheap soles that looked overly white and were made of uncomfortable plastic instead of rubber. When he held his legs straight out before him, I could see that someone—his mother, I supposed—had printed in permanent marker an R on the sole of his right sneaker and an L on the sole of his left.

Scott distributed the canteens. There were five so we each got our own. “It’s just filled with water. In case, you know, we get thirsty or whatever. But I also brought something to keep us awake, too.” He returned to his backpack and produced two six-packs of Jolt Cola. “Extra caffeine to keep us going.”

“I love this man,” Michael said. He was seated on his army helmet like a soldier on break, drumming his hands against his thighs. “Toss me one of those, Scotty boy.”

“Just what he needs,” Peter commented. “More caffeine.”

Scott pulled some cans of Jolt free from the pack and tossed them around. Adrian was the only one who didn’t take one.

A moment later when Scott took out a pack of Camels and offered a cigarette to Adrian, the smaller boy recoiled into the niche in the tree and said, “Those things give you cancer.”

Scott cocked his head and didn’t seem like he cared all that much. He stuck one of the smokes between his lips, then chased it with his lighter for several seconds before catching and lighting the tip.

Silence overtook us. Even Michael was uncharacteristically quiet. We all sat in our rough circle about the clearing as a cool wintry wind shook the skeletal tree branches and rattled the remaining leaves like maracas. In the far distance, I heard children shouting somewhere across December Park. Beyond the park and the woods, Harting Farms ended abruptly at the edge of a cliff that overlooked the Chesapeake Bay.

Again, I recalled that day so many years ago when Charles and I had gone out on the boat and he had pointed up to the cliff and at the giant holes bored into the face of it. Some had looked large enough to drive a car through. With terrible clarity, I saw my brother’s tanned chest and the flecks of bay salt that crystalized in his dark eyelashes. I shivered.